Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan opens as 30-year-old Tommie Shaw is shown a newspaper report by her panicked sister Georgie revealing that their mother, Gloria, is set to release a new memoir. What follows is an engaging and rewarding black comedy, as Tommie and Georgie's panic spirals and they clamor to control Gloria while also dealing with the painful legacy of their fatherless childhood. A series of flashbacks to Tommie’s teenage years help to explain her now destructive and out-of-control lifestyle as an adult. Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan also tackles heavy subjects, including suicide and self-harm, with a light touch that feels honest rather than glib. Poets Are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan is the story of a dysfunctional family, but more importantly, about facing fears and moving on.

Harry Rigby is right there, an eye-witness when Finn Hamilton walks out into the big nothing nine stories up, but no one wants to believe Finn is just the latest statistic in Ireland's silent epidemic. Not Finn's mother, Saoirse Hamilton, whose property empire is crumbling around her; and not Finn's pregnant fiance, Maria, or his sister Grainne; and especially not Detective Tohill, the cop who believes Rigby is a stone-cold killer. Welcome to Harry Rigby's Sligo where death comes dropping slow. Studded with shards of black humor and mordant wit, Slaughter's Hound is a gripping noir from one of the most innovative voices in Irish crime fiction. In the twisted moral landscape of his surroundings, Harry must find a way free of his own heartache and pain to discover the truth about Finn’s death and what is really going on…

A gritty black comedy from a talented writer, this is an unconventional love story and an insight into the bleak landscape of post-boom Ireland. Author Christine Dwyer Hickey agrees: 'Dark, often disturbing and utterly absorbing. In The Ballad of Mo & G, Billy Keane has entered a tough world and handled it with great skill and humanity. It is also a love story for our time.' ' Even though I wished it was me she was married to, I was still hoping Mo would be happy ever after with Dermo Olsen. That was until the violence started. I loved her that much. Can you believe that?' Welcome to an unnamed town in the southwest of Ireland, where Mo and G have what could loosely be described as a dysfunctional relationship. Between the sex, beatings, and pining after Mo, there’s barely time for G to worry about his arch-enemies, the Olsens - or their Dobermans. G is plagued by nightmares, and sometimes tries to do the right thing. Very occasionally, he succeeds. In The Ballad of Mo& G, Billy Keane tackles lives lived on the edge with a sharp yet compassionate eye, and a biting black humor. An assured report from Ireland’s dark, post-boom underbelly by a supremely talented storyteller.

A small, touristy, Greek island. Sun. Sea. Sand. The perfect ingredients for a two-week package holiday - getting away from it all, taking a break from the madness. For Rob and Georgie, a young couple in their late twenties, it's a chance to reconnect, spend some much-needed time together during their busy, urban lives. For Michael, a shy, introverted man, stranded alone at the same hotel, after the friend with whom he was supposed to be holidaying returns home unexpectedly, the holiday is a revelation. Georgie feels sorry for Michael and befriends him, chatting to him each morning by the pool, sharing her thoughts and feelings. Rob is somewhat irritated by Georgie's relationship with Michael, even though he seems to be no threat and doesn't bother the two of them particularly. But Michael is increasingly drawn to Georgie. Having had no real experience himself of life or love, he takes Georgie at face value, giving huge weight to her confessions, unaware of some of their nuances and complexities. Unable to understand or deal with his conflicting emotions, and at the mercy of his powerful fantasy life, Michael sets in motion a plan that will have devastating consequences for all concerned. A taut psychological thriller, Travelling Companion is a study of how ordinary people commit appalling acts, and how horrific actions can grow from trivial misunderstandings and from the simple misreading of the signals we unwittingly give to one another.

Throughout history, determined individuals have appropriated and reconstructed rhetorical and religious resources to create effective arguments. In the process, they have remade both themselves and their communities. This edited volume offers notable examples of these reconstructions, ranging from the formation of Christianity to questions about the relationship of religious and academic ways of knowing. The initial chapters explore historic challenges to Christian doctrines and gender roles. Contributors examine Mormon women’s campaigns for the recognition of their sect, women’s suffrage, and the statehood of Utah; the Seventh-day Adventist challenge to the mainstream designation of Sunday as the Sabbath; a female minister who confronted the gendered tenets of early Methodism and created her own sacred spaces; women who, across three centuries, fashioned an apostolic voice of humble authority rooted in spiritual conversion; and members of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who redefined notions of women’s intellectual capacity and appropriate fields for work from the Civil War through World War II.Considering contemporary learning environments, other contributors explore resources that can help faculty and students of composition and rhetoric consider more fully the relations of religion and academic work. These contributors call upon the work of theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars to propose strategies for building trust through communication.The final chapters examine the writings of Apostle Paul and his use of Jewish forms of argumentation and provide an overarching discussion of how the Christian tradition has resisted rhetorical renovation, and in the process, missed opportunities to renovate spiritual belief.

Gerald Vizenor weaves an engrossing historical portrayal of Native American soldiers in World War I. Blue Ravens is set at the start of the twentieth century in the days leading up to the Great War in France, and continues in combat scenes at Château-Thierry, Montbréhain, and Bois de Fays. The novel contains many of Vizenor's recurrent cultural themes-the power and irony of trickster stories, the privilege of survivance over victimry, natural reason and resistance. After serving in the American Expeditionary Forces, two brothers from the Anishinaabe culture return to the White Earth Reservation where they grew up. They eventually leave for a second time to live in Paris where they lead successful and creative lives. With a spirited sense of "chance, totemic connections, and the tricky stories of our natural transience in the world," Vizenor creates an expression of presence commonly denied Native Americans. Blue Ravens is a story of courage in poverty and war, a human story of art and literature from a recognized master of the postwar American novel and one of the most original and outspoken Native voices writing today. Check for the online reader's companion at blueravens.site.wesleyan.edu.

Sound of the Ax brings together for the first time over four hundred aphorisms and twenty-six aphoristic poems by one of America’s most essential poets of the twentieth century. Many readers are familiar with the trenchant nature of William Stafford’s poems, with lines such as “Justice will take us millions of intricate moves” and “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be,” but have never had the opportunity to read a sustained selection from the thousands of wise, witty, and penetrating statements he created in over forty years of daily writing in his journal. In keeping with Stafford’s varied interests, the aphorisms in Sound of the Ax explore many topics—war and peace, involvement, aging, appearances, fear, egotism, writing, nature, animals, suffering, faith, living an ethical life, and so on—with his incisive view. The poems are either made up entirely or primarily aphorisms, and range from the well-known “Things I Learned Last Week” to some never before collected. Readers will find much to enjoy and to think about here, and will return over and over to Sound of the Ax for inspiration, pleasure, and wisdom from an author noted for his integrity and mindful living.

Jean Baptiste Chabot, who produced works like Synodicon Orientale, surveys the different branches of the Aramaic Aramaic languages and their extant literature in theology, science, and history, as well as inscriptions at archaeological sites. Chabot demonstrates his expertise in the field, drawing from sources as diverse as the Samaritan Bible and the Talmud, Oriental Christianity, Babylon and Mesopotamia. Originally written in 1910, it will still be of interest to scholars in the fields of Aramaic, linguistics, Syriac studies and Eastern Christianity.

Colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project. These essays offer a probing analysis of selected lexical tools and methods for working with ancient Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek sources, as well as offering reflections on methodological concerns for lexicographical tools of the future.

Appearance and disguise—in a Costa Rican rainforest, a West Village repair shop, or an intimate relationship—reveal the turbulence that undergirds daily life, as families and places undergo change. In "Elegy for the Norther Flying Squirrel" and "Divers," Becker takes up the science of climate change and habitat loss. "Language that is by turns virtuosic and quiet, astonishing and accurate," writes a reviewer of Becker's 2006 collection, Domain of Perfect Affection for Jewish Book World Magazine. The challenge of "aligning loss with love" exerts a potent tension in Tiger Heron, as age comprises mortal bodies and intimacies end. A self-mocking wit propels characters "to find and lose and find each other again"—in the imagination and in the stories these poems tell. The final line of "The Sounds of Yiddish"—"Spare us what we can learn to endure"—closes a playful send-up, dramatizing language, culture, and power. Writing in The Washington Post, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky praises Becker's "comic timing." Longtime readers of Becker's work will delight in poems cast in a variety of stanzas and experimental forms. Their occasions are diverse—an animal shelter, a failed trip to Venice, a hospice bedside—but Becker ultimately yokes a language of praise to our stumbling, humble, human efforts.

Bloom in Reverse chronicles the aftermath of a friend's suicide and the end of a turbulent relationship, working through devastation and loss while on a search for solace that spans from local bars to online dating and beyond to ultimately find true connection and sustaining love. Things move backwards, from death to life, like a reverse time-lapse video of a dead flower morphing from brittle, scorched entity to floral glory to nacsent bud. The poems seek to find those places where the natural world connects to and informs experiences at the core of human relationships, and at times call upon principles and theories from physics and mathematics to describe the complexities of love and loss. It's a book where grief, melancholy, heartbreak, and disillusionment intersect with urban romanticism, hope, possibility, and love. Bloom is all of it, the terrible and the beautiful.

Ethiopic-Latin dictionary, with an appendix on Tigrean

This is a beginner’s guide to conversational Syriac with translations in French and Arabic.

In Imperial, George Bilgere’s sixth collection of poetry, he continues his exploration of the beauties, mysteries, and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in mid-America. In poems that range from the Cold War anxieties of the 1950s to the perils and predicaments of an aging Boomer in a post-9/11 world, Bilgere’s rueful humor and slippery syntax become a trapdoor that at any moment can plunge the reader into the abyss. In Bilgere’s world a yo-yo morphs into an emblem for the atomic bomb. A spot of cancer flames into the Vietnam War. And the death of a baseball player reminds us, in this age of disbelief, of the importance—the necessity—of myth.

Perhaps Paul Kareem Taylor said it best in his piece called On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby's American Odyssey: "Reading Barbara Hamby's poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the world we inhabit."

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than 25 million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. In spite of the popular interest in her ideas, or perhaps because of it, RandÆs work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. Though best known among philosophers for her strong support of egoism in ethics and capitalism in politics, there is an increasingly widespread awareness of both the range and the systematic character of RandÆs philosophic thought. This new series, developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker.The first volume starts not with the metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals of RandÆs thought, but with central aspects of her ethical theory. Though her endorsement of ethical egoism is well-known—one of her most familiar essay collections is The Virtue of Selfishness—the character of her egoism is not. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition. Philosophers interested in the objectivity of value, in the way ethical theory is (and is not) virtue-based, and in acquiring a serious understanding of an egoistic moral theory worthy of attention will find much to consider in this volume, which includes critical responses to several of its main essays.